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“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... slowly, a mother’s too quickly. A card from Knopf, ‘the usual about receiving the ms’, was nice, but rejections from the ‘disdainful New Yorker’ came in twos. Plath wrote letters in an era when paper and ink still made things happen. You might send a telegram or pick up the phone for the birth of a grandchild, but you used letters to give news of a ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... College’). Jessy Mair was the wife of Beveridge’s cousin, and remained so until David Mair’s death in 1940, whereupon she became Lady Beveridge. By the beginning of 1921 she was installed as secretary and dean at LSE, with unique access to the director throughout his tenure. She later wrote that she had ‘established when I came to the ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... Year of Living Dangerously.* Credit for the screen adaptation is given to Mr Koch, together with David Williamson and Peter Weir himself. Some faults in the film probably have to do with production difficulties – for instance, the fact that all the Malay characters speak Tagalog (all right for the Philippines, where the film was shot) instead of Bahasa ...”

“... elderly, garrulous addicts to court fashion, this guide to their mannered pronunciation seems a nice characterising touch. We might be irritated with Muir for removing it; Wells’s principles for modernisation require that the word remain if it has a characterising function, but the good principle has arguably failed in practice. In the Greek council scene ...”

“... must minister to the rich.’   ‘Of course,’ said Ianthe. ‘And you have some very nice people in your congregation,’ she added consolingly.   ‘Yes, both my church wardens are titled men,’ said Randolph simply. He stood with the carving implements poised over the ruined saddle. ‘Let me give you some more mutton, my ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... they are playing, it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either ...”

“... met with setbacks – the Sardinian police, taking him for a revolutionary, re-routed him via Nice. Momentum was lost, consolation discovered in writing the Roi Lear Overture and making love ‘to a girl on the shore’. In 1831 Harriet had returned to demeaning provincial engagements (Norwich, Bristol, Lincoln, Liverpool); then back to the Royal Coburg ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a substantial private library – such ...”

“... at this collection, this fat blue chunk of his life, Penman missed. The tarted-up paperback is nice to have around but the words are in pages, not columns. They don’t play off smudged photographs and corner of the eye glimpses of other reports over which he had no control. Penman liked the William Burroughs moment, reading the tabloid spread as a single ...”

“... early television career in the 1960s had its frothy side. He helped create a variety show, Nice Time, co-hosted by Kenny Everett. He worked on programmes involving cartoons and, more famously, Mick Jagger. He spent his salary on clothes from Granny Takes a Trip, the prosperous London hippie’s retailer of choice on the King’s Road. ‘I wanted to ...”